Core Post: Code

What is software as media; what meanings does a program carry; what does it mean to be programmed or encoded? Is software is distinct from natural language because it enacts—it does something? Here Chun teases out the space between inscription and execution that MacKenzie and Galloway (and others like Kate Hayles and Ellen Ullman) conflate. For MacKenzie code is performative, meaning that in its text “describing and enacting what is described coalesce” (73). But MacKenzie’s analysis of the impacts of Linux is concerned as much with the social perceptions inscribed by what the code is purported to accomplish. In that sense maybe he agrees with Chun’s disputing claim that “Source code, in other words, may be sources of things other than the machine execution it is ‘supposed’ to engender” (313). It feels easy to get entangled in the nuances, but if we were to chart a comparison of how much each author overlaps language and action, and in which directions those vectors extend, how would it look?

In a brief gloss, MacKenzie leans toward conflation, code acts, is performative, extends its action beyond its executables to culture but not as far maybe as Parikka (or not as far explicitly into labor), and does not separate its inscription from execution (or then impact or imaginary) as Chun does. Galloway emphasizes the hierarchical aspects of this separation, linking them to ideological/spiritual telos, albeit tangled, while Keeling in a way instrumentalizes all of the above into a call to action to undermine it, shift its orientations. Or perhaps it works backward and says that ideology is software (rather than the other way around) and different, better versions should be applied when designing and running our technologies.

I tend to fall in the Keeling & Chun camps (stan, scholarly heart eyes emoji), but my critical reading style is “yes, and” so I looked for what concepts some of the other authors also brought to the mix that could be useful (to at least my thinking): I’m interested in MacKenzie’s “wavering line between code object and code subject (81). Setting aside the typical “tech bro” subject, how does the creation of code objects reinstantiate code subjects? Also his focus on citation & circulation, as constitutive acts, as erasure (and consumption vs reconfigurability). What is created & covered over by this repetition? (78). Does this cite Derrida’s “Signature Event Context”? (D talks of “coded” iterable models that are “identifiable as citation.” Interestingly ritual also comes up here, as it does in Chun.)

In Parikka, I was also interested in the creation of subjects, the distributed self as applied to software logics—people as computational units, and computers as brain/subjectivity units. He teases out the human logics embedded in the logics of software design, project management, team management (“metaprogramming”), which also feeds back into other forms of human-work design—and particularly also embeds in all kinds of language around that (46). Parikka also brings back the limits of bodies, different kinds of bodies (Fuller/Goffey’s “evil media studies” and “gray media,” would like to know more about this) through his focus on the mundane exhaustive labor of software as opposed to self-expression and creation. Finally, “cultural techniques” ties together brains, techniques, technologies, infrastructures/organizations, workflows, abstractions in a way that could be useful to bring back to thinking about ideology and the kinds of things that code executes.